Any discussion of the background art throughout the specification should in no way be considered as an admission that such art is widely known or forms part of common general knowledge in the field.
A known approach for providing video surveillance is to install a plurality of cameras for collecting video data, connect those cameras to a common computer network, and assign those cameras across a number of camera servers on the network. Each camera server has three main purposes: firstly, to make available live video data collected from its one or more assigned cameras; secondly, to record video data collected from its one or more assigned cameras; and thirdly, to make available the recorded video data.
Generally speaking, video data is “made available” in the sense that it is accessible by a client over the network. For example, a client connects to a camera server, and streams a clip of video data that is made available by that camera server.
There may be situations where a particular camera is initially assigned to a first camera server, and later assigned to a second camera server. For example, this may occur where the first camera server is brought offline for maintenance and the camera manually reassigned, or subject to a camera server failover procedure as discussed in PCT/AU2008/000099. In known systems, a client wishing to view video data from that camera is required to separately obtain clips from each of the camera servers. This is by no means ideal, particularly in security applications, given the potential for confusion or misinterpretation of footage obtained around the time of the camera server reassignment.
There is a need in the art for improved systems and methods for managing video data.